Today’s top tech news: OpenAI to remove non-profit control; Meta unveils VR headset, Orion glasses; X to request restoration in Brazil

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OpenAI to remove non-profit control

OpenAI will reportedly be restructuring its core as a non-profit organisation to for-profit to make itself even more appealing to investors. But the non-profit will go on to exist while having a minority stake in the for-profit company. Meanwhile, CEO and co-founder Sam Altman will also be owning some percentage of stake in the company which could come up to $150 billion after the restructuring. This could also have an impact on how OpenAI manages AI risks later.

Additionally, in another spate of shock exits, company CTO Mira Murati, Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and VP Research Barret Zoph announced their departure from the AI firm. While Altman said that the reason behind them leaving were all independent of each other, speculation rose whether the change in structure could be responsible for this. Besides, co-founder Greg Brockman had also announced that he would be taking a sabbatical this year in August earlier.

Meta unveils VR headset, Orion glasses

Meta has unveiled a cheaper virtual reality headset and Ray Ban smart glasses as well as its latest Llama 3.2 model and a prototype of their advanced AR glasses, Orion at Meta Connect held yesterday. CEO Mark Zuckerberg demoed Orion showing how it interacted with the voice, hand gestures and typing and even the “neural interface,” meaning it can send a signal from the brain to the device. However, there’s no foreseeable date on the release of the product yet. 

The company also showed a cheaper version of the Quest 3 called the 3S priced at $299 compared to the original $499. The headset will start shipping from October 15. Besides these, the new Llama 3.2 model finally has multimodality and is able to analyse both image and text. This is also the company’s first open-source AI model with image processing. Customers can also interact with the Llama chatbot in the voices of celebrities like John Cena and Judi Dench among others. 

X to request restoration in Brazil

Elon Musk’s social media platform X will reportedly submit the documents asked by Brazil’s Supreme Court by next week so that their service can be restored in the country. The country has blocked access to the platform since an ongoing war between the Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes and Musk. Moraes had accused X of spreading hate messages in the country and wanted an investigation into “digital militias” on there. 

Due to the dispute, X was forced to shut down its office in Brazil and fire employees including their legal agent which breached local law. Musk’s company will also have to comply with other demands from the court like blocking profiles of people who were allegedly spreading fake news and pay a $3 million fine via Starlink’s accounts. 

Published - September 26, 2024 03:37 pm IST